ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Deadly avian influenza has been found among
migrating geese in Asia.

Once associated only with domesticated
fowl, a virus thought to have the potential to trigger a pandemic
among humans may now be leapfrogging across the globe in wild
flocks.

The first major outbreak reported
in wild birds killed thousands of waterfowl at Qinghai Lake in
western China, according to reports published last month in Science
and Nature. Russian health officials confirmed last week that
the disease appeared in poultry in western Siberia near Novosibirsk,
possibly carried from Southeast Asia by other migrating birds.

Scientists fear that the H5N1
virus will now spread along the world's flyways to Europe, India
and other population centers.

Alaska is the first stop on
the avian route from Asia to North America.

Are we next?

To answer that question, dozens
of biologists had already launched an ambitious project this
summer testing thousands of wild geese, ducks and other migrating
birds across the state for the presence of avian influenza.

Think of it as a viral missile
defense system, using sterile swabs instead of radar to catch
the flu bugs carried by birds.

Most alarming on the list of
possible discoveries is the deadly H5N1, a strain of avian flu
that has infected at least 109 people in four countries, killing
half of them, since it erupted among Southeast Asian poultry
flocks in 2003, according to the World Health Organization.

"Alaska is the one place
in the world where migratory birds (from both hemispheres) come
together," said Jonathan Runstadler, a veterinarian and
assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of
Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology. "We potentially
could have overlap of viral strains from the Americas and Asia.
. . . It could be sort of a keystone for the virus's ecology."

Both domesticated and wild
birds carry all kinds of flu, most posing no threat to people.
But scientists have linked several of the most deadly human epidemics
to strains originating in poultry or livestock.

As a result, tracking the evolution
of the H5N1 bird flu has become one of the most critical tasks
facing world health officials over the past two years.

In its present form, the H5N1
virus doesn't easily infect people - almost all victims caught
the virus directly from infected domestic fowl.

But if the virus were to mutate
into a form that could pass easily from person to person, it
could trigger a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 flu epidemic,
which killed 50 million people worldwide and thousands in Alaska.

Researchers who have been scrambling
for a human vaccine against the virus reported promising results
last week from early tests, and federal officials said Sunday
they will stockpile millions of doses. But so far, the vaccine
has been tested on only 450 people and there are questions about
whether manufacturers can fill the demand if the disease starts
to move rapidly through large human populations.

In a sense, Runstadler and
other biologists are monitoring Alaska's avian tourists, screening
the state's migrating and resident birds.

The project is called the University
of Alaska Program on the Biology and Epidemiology of Avian Influenza
in Alaska, and is funded by one of the university's biomedical
research programs.

Pinning down basics - where
the different strains of flu virus live, how they spread, how
they change, how they interact with the birds - is a necessary
first step.

"One of the reasons we
don't understand the ecology of the virus is that we don't know
what happens to the virus in its natural ecosystem," Runstadler
said in a written statement explaining the program. "We
need to understand how the biology of birds impacts disease transmission."

So far, the project has marshaled
30 to 40 field biologists. They and their associates will swab
the intestinal openings of 5,000 birds temporarily captured for
banding or other studies. By the end of the season, they hope
to sample 25 species from all regions of the state.

The intestinal samples will
be checked in a lab for avian influenza virus. Positive hits
will get their genetic secrets cracked and then catalogued in
a public database of DNA maintained by the National Institutes
of Health.

Finally, a team of Alaska scientists
will create a geographic database showing types of flu, species
of birds, where and when they surfaced.

The H5N1 flu reportedly killing
wild birds in western China and Russia is not identical to the
H5N1 flu that killed people in Southeast Asia, Runstadler said.

But any H5N1 in migratory birds
could evolve into something far more threatening to humans as
the virus mixes and interacts with other strains in other birds,
livestock and even people.

With birds from across the
globe mingling each summer, Alaska could become an especially
potent zone for viral mutation, Runstadler said.

"Can geese or ducks or
other migratory birds bring a potentially harmful agent to Alaska
and then to other areas as well? Yes, that's a possibility."

No evidence exists that Alaskans
have ever caught flu directly from wild birds in the state, he
said. And no one has found the deadly H5N1 strain in Alaska's
migrating birds.

But scientists need more data.

"Right now if this H5N1
strain in Asia and Russia erupted into a pandemic strain,"
which could easily spread person to person, "we really don't
have any basis for understanding what to do about that."